By Umaru Fofana
Staff morale is at a very low ebb as teachers and pupils compete to see who plays truant more recklessly. There is hardly any effective monitoring of teachers. Classrooms are often ruggedly floored and covered with dusty dinginess. They are overcrowded too, with kids hardly able to write or even breathe properly. The school environment is awful: hardly any water for the kids, or toilets, or napkins.
Teachers sell to the kids poorly-prepared food often with a putrid taste and oblige the hapless children to buy it or face the consequence. Pupils are obliged to buy poorly-written plagiarised pamphlets or lose marks. Some of the kids return home unlearned instead of taught, and potentially sick. When it rains leakages in the school structure leave them rain-beaten. In the dry season some go home in bright coloured uniforms turned brown.
This is the picture of the average public school in Sierra Leone - primary and secondary. And no one seems to care, after all only the kids of the extremely poor go there. The authorities can pay lip service and bandy about with figures of school enrolment as garrulously as they wish, but the reality is that this country is lagging behind the rest of its worthy fellow West African nations in this very crucial areas.
The authorities bandy about with numbers of kids in school as if all thanks to them. Almost all parents in especially big towns now value education so much so that they want their children schooled and are ready to sacrifice all they have to achieve that. But how about the have-nots!
The reality in more remote areas is such that kids still languish because their parents are too poor to afford to send them to school. Sometime last year I went to a village outside Kenema to do a story on Lassa fever for the US public network PBS. I had to hold a village hall meeting with the parents to encourage them to send their kids to school because many of them were running around semi-naked with old car tyres with sticks tucked inside. I emphasised to them the importance of a good quality education for their children, as the only assured means to lift them out of poverty.
Not long ago Sierra Leone’s National Education Board met a cross section of proprietors of independent schools in the country. It followed what the ministry of education said was the eroding standards in these schools and the exploitative manner in which the school owners charge fees.
It is incontrovertible that some private or independent schools have decrepit - even make-believe - structures, and their standards come nowhere near acceptable levels expected of learning institutions in that category. Never mind their skyrocketed fees. That is true except that it is so because public schools in the country have become virtually useless. And it beats my imagination that the National Education Board is not spending on the public schools a fraction of the efforts it seems to be spending on regulating the private schools. And here is the irony: if the National Education Board emphasises on improving public schools, they will need little or no effort on private schools. Reason: Public schools will improve so tremendously that the private ones would be forced to get their standards right or they risk extinction, as no one would be willing to pay expensive fees without the corresponding service being offered.
But that doesn't seem to concern them. Why would it! I bet my life that the children and grandchildren of those Board members and senior government officials attend independent schools. But the public schools are where the vast majority of the masses - the poor ones - send their kids to.
In the last two weeks I have been to some public schools in Freetown, Bo and Makeni - never mind the villages and towns in-between them - and they have left me cringing and wondering what the future holds for my country. Evidence abound to show the direct correlation between good quality education and a decline in poverty. What transpires in these public schools makes the kids unlearn and become sick.Like killing a dead man.
The children of poor people who are determined to get a good quality education and uplift their families from the doldrums of grinding poverty cannot achieve that magic key. Unfortunately these children go through all of this and many end up dropping out because of the disincentive such brings.
Results are out for the West Africa-wide school-leaving or university entrance examination known by its acronym, WASSCE. Before that we had the primary school-leaving NPSE one and the middle school leaving BECE. It doesn't require rocket science that independent schools performed far better. It is not magical - the difference is in the quality of learning and teaching and the environment. A good number of the teachers in public schools did better in college than those in private schools - or are more brilliant generally. You now understand why even some of the very poor try hard to send their kids to independent schools - however dodgy the school.
Education, says Mandela, is the great engine of personal development. “It is through education that the daughter of a peasant can become a doctor…that the child of farm workers can become the president”. And if that reaches the vast majority through public schools, those schools must receive the needed attention. But in Sierra Leone it would seem there is a deliberate attempt to deny the poor an education so the children of the rich and powerful will continue from where their parents left off, and the poor kids will follow in the footsteps of theirs.
While I agree there is need to regulate independent schools the real effort should be concentrated on public schools. Inspection should be intensified and not that pretence which sees the headteacher/principal and the inspector of schools parley as they exchange envelopes to gloss over the malaise that exists.
What poor investment in public education leaves us is a nation struggling to grow as joblessness flourishes. Jobs created in Sierra Leone are given to people brought in from elsewhere. As unemployment grows the jobless young people become angry and the security of the state gets threatened. Civil unrest becomes unavoidable. We tinker on the brink of fragility. Investors flee. Growth stagnates. We go back full throttle - the cycle of conflict, the cycle of grinding poverty. And a state collapse. Let’s curb it now or we get ready to start all over again.
(C) Politico 26/01/16
